Raise your voice, open your mind, unlock your imagination

At the moment, artificial intelligence is advancing at an exponential rate. This means that soon day-to-day jobs can be taken over by machines. Artificial intelligence is the development of computer systems able to perform tasks which usually require human intelligence, this is commonly referred to as AI. Some examples are, visual perception, speech recognition, decision making and many other human-like tasks. There are two opinions to this, the people that are for it and the people that are against it. Being for it means that you don’t have to endure as many day-to-day things which cause unnecessary stress. There are many benefits but also disadvantages of AI, these advances will change your future life.

How Artificial intelligence works is very complex but is a similar way to how humans learn. It is done through artificial neural networks. These systems learn to do tasks by considering examples, generally without task-specific-programming. For example in image recognition, they might learn to identify images that have dogs in them. Analyzing the images that have been manually labelled as dog or no dog and then using the analytic results to identify a dog in other images. So they basically memorize the characteristics of it and then store this data. The huge advantage is that it can store large amounts of data and get them very quick. A recent example is a robot named IBM Watson which won the show Jeopardy. Watson is a question answering computer system which is capable of answering questions posed in natural language. The TV show is about general knowledge, the participants get asked any questions on all topics. Watson was put against two previous winners and bet them by a great margin. This proves that the robot is much better than even the best humans. It was done without any internet connection, but it had over four terabytes worth of stored information that it previously learnt. This was a big breakthrough in the world of AI but there still needs to be a lot more done for it to become more useful to the human race. As Allan Turing once said, “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human”. By this he means that you’d know that AI has succeed if you could have a phone call with a computer and not realize.

There are many benefits to AI, the main advantage to the average human is that increases efficiency in every day life and makes the things you have to endure less. This means that you have more time to do other things that you enjoy such as spending time with friends or anything else that you feel like doing. AI is able to do this through many ways, a few ways are driver-less cars, personal assistants which can do most things such as cleaning and other house hold things but also be a personal tutor or recognize your emotions and try put you in a better mood. Not everyone wants a robot by their side doing these things, but it will certainly decrease things you have to endure every day.

This will increase the accuracy of jobs such as surgeons, GP’s, lawyers and many more critical thinking professions. It is able to do this as the robots don’t have emotions so can make decisions easier without taking into consideration race or friends and family which could affect a human’s decision. Not only this but they have a lot more knowledge than what we can remember in our brains and access it way faster than we can. Therefore they are ideal for jobs that require quick and precise decision making. For example, if you needed an emergency operation after a car crash and you only had a few minutes left before you die, you wouldn’t want the surgeon trying to think about what they needed to do. On top of this the robots don’t make basic human errors and can work around the clock as they don’t need breaks, which makes them the correct solution to these problems. This means that people don’t lose their loved ones.

With all these benefits there are disadvantages, the main one being the cost of developing and producing such machines. Although the price will eventually drop like it has with other more developed technology such as laptops. Some people wonder about the ethics of having robots take over what humans do as they don’t have any emotions or feelings. Not only this but there are people that believe that they might out power us and take over the world. A lot of highly intelligent people have warned of this including Stephen hawking who warns that AI could call the end to the human kind. This is unlikely but depends on your mind set, overall there are more benefits than there are disadvantages.

Artificial intelligence is guaranteed to effect your future life. Ray Kurzweil the director of engineering at google said, “Computers will be able to read at human levels by 2029”. So in 12 years computers will have gained an intelligence equal to what us humans have. This means that most likely jobs will be lost by then and taken over by machines but there also will be jobs also gained through other sectors. Some jobs that could potentially be taken over or assisted by AI, Drivers such as taxis and bus, Accountants, lawyers, medical professions, farmers, construction workers and many more. Therefore there will be a big boom in the technology, creativity and other sectors. Eric Schmidt a former CEO of google believes that there will be more jobs created through the increase in artificial intelligence than lost. Weather there are more jobs lost or gained it will for certain effect your future life and most likely your job.

A recent example of Artificial intelligence gone too far is with Facebook chat-bots. These were discovered to have started making their own language that wasn’t able to be interpreted by humans. This lead to Facebook shutting it down. This is quite alarming but doesn’t mean that they should stop all machine learning and AI but instead proceed with caution and better understand what is happening.

Artificial intelligence will make the things you have to endure everyday less and allow you with more time to do things that are joyful. How it is done is very complex but is similar to the way us humans think. Artificial intelligence will effect our lives, how far it is able to go is determined by us as a society. There are people that are for artificial intelligence but also people against it, its a good thing but the leading developers such as google should slow down the rate of progress and better understand what is happening to avoid any incidents in the future.